Puzzle Quest is no stranger to gameplay bugs in any of its myriad releases, but the iPhone version deleting characters takes the cake for the “kick in the shins” category.

According to forum posts on touchArcade and my own awful experience on a six hour car ride, heroes are randomly deleted from the game. You’ll save a hero and quit out as per normal, but when you go back in and select Continue Quest or Change Hero, that character will be inexplicably gone. When this bug occurs, you cannot recreate the character because the game claims that the hero already exists – but no matter how many times you quit out and reload, you won’t ever get that hero back.

Calls to Puzzle Quest iPhone port handler Transgaming Technologies were not immediately returned, but touchArcade reports that the company is “looking into” the problem as well as into gripes about not being able to read the tutorial text.

Puzzle Quest for the iPhone was released December 23 for the App Store and retails for $9.99 USD. It’s the first of three installments for the Puzzle Quest series, with Chapter 2 to come “soon,” according to the original press release.